Week-long bike tour routes announced in Iowa, Kansas; end of the road for Tour de Kota

Just as two week-long mass bicycle tours — RAGBRAI and B.A.K. — announced their host cities for 2013, a third is calling it quits and partnering with a two-day bicycle festival. Ride the Rockies makes its announcement on Saturday.

After eight years, the Argus Leader Tour de Kota in South Dakota is pulling the plug on its week-long bike tour in the southeastern part of the state.

Instead, the newspaper is partnering with Sioux Falls in a weekend citywide wellness event that includes bicycling on both days.

Tour Sioux Falls, June 29, is a ride on the city’s fully opened bike trail — about 20 miles. The ride ends with a festival on the River Greenway with food, music and family activities. The next day, June 30, the city is turning over 2.6 miles of streets to bicycles for a downtown ciclovia.

RAGBRAI — the oldest, largest and often longest — week-long bicycle tour rolls out July 21 through 27, 2013, on a 406-mile west-to-east route. The 10,000-plus bicycle riders will start in Council Bluffs and visit overnight in Harlan, Perry, Des Moines, Knoxville, Oskaloosa, and Fairfield before rolling to a stop in Fort Madison on the Mississippi River.

Usually keeping to the state’s small cities, the overnight in Des Moines is the tour’s first stop there since 1997.

Ride directions say this will be one of the easiest RAGBRAIs. It’s the second shortest route and the 15th flattest in the 41-year history of the ride. You might think that all RABBRAIs would be flat, but those constantly rolling hills add up.

The organizers will announce the exact route and pass-through towns in mid-March.

Registration is open now, so sign up for the lottery at the RAGBRAI website.

Biking Across Kansas 2013

Biking Across Kansas

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